Shadow Divers, Robert Kurson
Shadow Divers, Robert Kurson
17 Rating(s)
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Shadow Divers
The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

Author: Robert Kurson

Narrator: Campbell Scott

Abridged: 6 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/29/2004


Synopsis

New York Times Bestseller 

In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery–and make history themselves.

For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships.
But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried under decades of accumulated sediment.
No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location.

Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to an almost mystical sense of brotherhood with each other and with the drowned U-boat sailors–former enemies of their country. As the men’s marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew.

Author Robert Kurson’s account of this quest is at once thrilling and emotionally complex, and it is written with a vivid sense of what divers actually experience when they meet the dangers of the ocean’s underworld. The story of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to be true, but it all happened, two hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea.

About The Author

Robert Kurson earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, then a law degree from Harvard Law School. His award-winning stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Esquire, where he is a contributing editor. Crashing Through is based on Kurson’s 2006 National Magazine Award-winning profile in Esquire. He is the author of Shadow Divers, and he lives in Chicago. Visit the author’s website at www.robertkurson.com.


Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Richard on 2007-07-10 18:40:57

If you like diving and WW2 stories you will love this.

AudiobooksNow review by Cyndie Browning on 2008-02-02 10:56:33

I don't know why but I LOVE reading stories about submarines and undersea exploration--even tho' I can't look at the pictures. The thing is, I'm phobic about deep water and drowning, and have been since I was a very little girl. I think that's because I didn't learn to swim until I was 14. But I still read Ballard's book about finding the Titanic, and Shadow Divers was just as exciting. I really enjoyed listening to all the history of Germany's U-boats and the re-enactment of the last days of the crew of U-869, all of which gave faces and being to the shadows of the dead that Chatterton and Kohler found onboard the sub, and I loved following the detective work that helped lead to identifying the U-Who. An excellent book for anyone who enjoys a good mystery, history, and adventure, all wrapped up in the same story. And if you want a thrill, check out the artist's drawing of the U-869 at Kurson's website that's EXACTLY the kind of illustration that terrifies me!

Goodreads review by Mara on March 10, 2020

Well, I've done some calculations, and it turns out that there are precisely one-bagillion ways to die while deep water diving. As I'm neither Boyle, nor Dalton nor Henry I won't be going into grave (as in watery grave) detail vis-à-vis the laws of physics that make humans so ill-equipped to brave t......more

Goodreads review by Blondish And on September 07, 2019

This is not only the most thrilling non-fiction book I've EVER read, it is one of the most exciting, thrilling books of any genre! So many times the description for a true story says, “reads like an adventure story”, and then you read it and it's boring. This—THIS is flat out adventure! The “shadow......more


Quotes

“An engrossing saga of the suspenseful, intriguing, and dangerous underwater investigation of a Mystery U-boat.”
–CLIVE CUSSLER

“Robert Kurson’s Shadow Divers, about the divers exploring a sunken shipwreck off the New Jersey coast, is a gripping account of real-life adventurers and a real-life mystery. In addition to being compellingly readable on every page, the book offers a unique window on the deep, almost reckless nature of the human quest to know.”
–SCOTT TUROW, author of Reversible Errors

“A tremendously suspenseful story of discovery that comes as close as any book could to providing the reader with approximate sensations of deep sea diving and of life on a submarine at war, and that leaves us with a hell of an impression of the grit, guts, and compassion of a U-boat crew and the two American divers who risked everything to solve the mystery of their last mission.”
–JOHN MCCAIN, author of Faith of My Fathers and Why Courage Matters


“Robert Kurson’s status as an undiscovered pleasure among Chicago readers is about to change, I suspect, in a hurry. Shadow Divers is so culturally astute and terrifyingly suspenseful that it should reach the sort of audience John Berendt, Susan Orlean, Jon Krakauer and Laura Hillenbrand have recently earned. Kurson’s new focus is the larger historical world--a world of U-Boats, forensics and lung-crushing pressure--and his prose is, as always, plain gorgeous.”
–JAMES MCMANUS, author of Positively Fifth Street

“A winning tale exceedingly well told, Shadow Divers takes us on a dangerous and seemingly quixotic descent into the murk–and then, in a fog of nitrogen narcosis, brings us back to the surface with a richer, fuller fathoming of a history we only thought we knew.”
–HAMPTON SIDES, author of Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission


Awards

  • Margaret A. Edwards Award (Alex Awards)